Modern operating rooms for performing surgery have seen several advancements over the past two decades. In the late 20th century, state-of-the-art operating rooms included several electronic surgical instruments (i.e. electrosurgical units, insufflators, endoscopes etc.). These instruments were separately operated by the surgeon and members of the surgical team. The industry improved upon this type of operating room by integrating the various instruments into a unified system. With this setup, the surgeon and/or members of the team use a central controller (or surgical control unit) to control all of the instruments through a single interface (preferably a graphical-user interface). Generally speaking, these central control units were built using modified personal computers and the operating rooms that use them are commonly referred to as “digital operating rooms”.
The establishment of the digital operating room paved the way for the voice controlled operating room. With this system, a member of the surgical team (usually the surgeon) wears a headset with a microphone. The surgeon issues spoken commands into the headset, these commands are sent to the central controller which controls the various instruments to perform desired tasks or make on-the-fly adjustments to operating parameters. The central controller operates software including a speech-to-text converter to interpret and execute the voice commands. Since computers often have difficulty understanding spoken language, typical systems include audible confirmation feedback to the surgical team, notifying them that a command has been understood and executed by the controller. Since sterility is critically important in all surgical procedures, this touch-free control system represented a significant advancement.
The voice-controlled digital operating room was further improved by the introduction of the wireless voice-control headset. This gave the surgeon greater mobility and eliminated the microphone cable as a possible source of contamination or nuisance for the surgeon. The wireless revolution also ushered in the use of wireless input devices such as smart phones and tablets in digital operating rooms. Using one of these systems, a member of the surgical team can remotely control the digital operating room by manually entering commands into the wireless input device (i.e. a tablet) which the wireless input device then transmits to the central control unit. Voice controlled digital operating rooms with wireless headsets and wireless input devices represent the modern state-of-the-art in the field.
Although this type of system has worked well for the convenience and efficacy of the surgical team and the maintenance of sterility, it has introduced certain heretofore unknown safety issues. One such safety issue is the problem of surgeons issuing commands into wireless headsets and input devices that are mated with a nearby room's surgical control unit. In that situation, a surgeon may attempt to control a surgical control unit present in the room they are occupying, only to inadvertently control another surgical control unit in a nearby room where an unrelated procedure is being performed. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that a surgeon may repeat commands in a vain attempt to operate the surgical control unit in the room they are occupying. This can result in injury to the patient and surgical team and/or damage to the equipment in the nearby room.
There remains a need in the art for a safety system that prevents the inadvertent control of surgical control units with wireless voice-control headsets and wireless input devices.